The Birthday Reception

At the Birthday Reception the talk in the doorway is all of Karenin: the Order of Alexander Nevsky, how he has aged, how he will not release a buttonholed Councillor until every point is expounded, whether Lydia Ivanovna is jealous of his wife, and the fact that he and Vronsky were seen arm in arm on the Morskaya. He does not hear any of it, being at that moment barring a member of the State Council's escape with a financial project. His career ended the year his wife left — everyone can see it; he cannot — and he is more satisfied with his work than ever, writing the first of an innumerable series of unwanted pamphlets and recalling St Paul on the unmarried man who cares for the things of the Lord. Passing the chamberlain's calves and the red neck of a Prince he reflects that everything in the world is sin. Lydia Ivanovna, dressed now only to keep the incongruity from being dreadful, is his one island in an ocean of hostility. She tells him Anna has written; his face goes death-like, and she weeps with admiration at the loftiness of his soul.

Tolstoy lets the room discuss a man's ruin in his hearing and shows him not hearing it, which is crueller than any scene of humiliation. The pamphlets are the career's corpse still moving. Karenin's scripture arrives precisely when it is useful, and Lydia Ivanovna's tears of admiration at a face gone dead are the measure of what she is actually looking at.